IPVanish Review

I purchased one month for $10, signup was easy and I was able to pay by bitcoin.

I was able to connect a PFSense box to the VPN quite easily, and I also installed the Windows and Android Apps.

Speed from my PFSense box was ok, but not great. I got around 58Mb/s over a 75Mb line. With ExpressVPN I got speeds in the mid 60's and PIA consistently gives me over 70Mb/s.

I also found that my VPN connections were prone to dropping out every few days, certainly more so than with ExpressVPN or PIA. (I've only used PIA for a week, but with ExpressVPN connections from the PFSense would stay up for weeks.)

The Windows client, which I used on multiple Windows 10 machines, is a pain in the ass. If you leave it at the default "Best City, Best Server" settings, it can take 3 or 4 minutes to connect. Once it's "Connecting" there's no cancel button, so if you want to manually select a server, or change a setting, your only option is to kill the application from task manager. I also found that the app just stopped running and disappeared from my system tray quite a few times.

There are a lot of servers to choose from, but many of them were problematic for me - for example, on the day I first signed up every single London server appeared to be blacklisted by Google and I was getting a captcha every time I tried to search.

I also got no notification that my subscription was expiring at the end of the month, which seems like poor service.

When you say they are not as ideal as reviews describe it what do you mean? I am having the issue that it seems just about every VPN has a post on here trashing it/ loving it. Hard to know who to believe.

Their data collecting declaration is quite sketchy from what I've read when I was browing for a VPN service.

In the end I got too confused about all the contradicting review and ended up choosing Private Internet Access (for now). My home's connection is normally slow, so I'm not sure if this VPN is good or bad in this regard. My connection did falter a few times this week though..